Forthcoming is the clout and bat-flip of a slugger who's been delivering in a timely and relentless manner ... 

That's Yasiel Puig's clutch pinch-hit blast against the Rockies on Wednesday night. That three-run homer in large measure buried the Rockies in the series finale and by extension all but ensured a determinative sweep. The Dodgers came in to the series in question a half-game behind the Rockies but emerged 2 1/2 games in front. At the moment, the SportsLine Projection Model gives the Dodgers a whopping 98 percent chance of winning the NL West for a sixth straight year. More than anything else, it's Puig's timely surge that's driven those odds up. 

The Dodgers have won seven of their last eight. This run started with the series finale in Cincinnati and was powered forward with their taking three of four in St. Louis. That's notable because coming into the final game of their series against the Reds, the Dodgers this season were a combined 0-9 against the Reds and Cardinals. That particular script got flipped in a big way over the following five games, and over that span Puig batted .500/.550/1.389 with five home runs (three of which came on Sept. 15 against St. Louis). As for that series against the Rockies, Puig logged just five plate appearances but put up a line of .600/.600/1.200 with, of course, the home run you saw above. Add it all up, and over these last eight games that have in some ways redefined the Dodgers' 2018 season, Puig has batted .480/.536/1.240. 

It's more than "just" that elite level of production over the short run. It's also the timeliness of Puig's outputs. To get a handle on this angle, let's turn to a stat called Win Probability Added (WPA). WPA is simply the sum of how a player has altered a team's chances of winning a given game. Strike out for the leading team in a 12-1 game in the eighth inning, and it'll move a player's WPA downward but do so by very little. Hit a walk-off three-run shot that turns a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 win, and that player's WPA will improve by a quite a lot. As for Puig, over this eight-game span, he's got a WPA of .683, which means, summed together, he's improved the Dodgers chances of winning by 68.3 percent over these contests. That's a huge number. Of the seven games the Dodgers have won over this stretch, Puig has played in six of them. Of those six, he's posted the highest WPA in three games. That's called moving the needle for your team. 

Overall, Puig has lifted his overall numbers quite a bit and now boasts an OPS+ of 126, which is the second-highest figure of his career. So on balance, the 27-year-old is having a strong season, but it's over the last week-plus that he's been the Dodgers' biggest difference-maker. That, of course, has coincided with the Dodgers' most critical stretch of the 2018 season thus far.